Date of Conferral

3-20-2026

Degree

Ph.D.

School

Counselor Education and Supervision

Advisor

Duane Halbur

Abstract

Cultural humility is essential to effective counseling across diverse populations, yet its dispositional foundations remain unclear, limiting the development of evidence based, personality informed training strategies in counselor education. Grounded in Foronda’s Cultural Humility theory, this quantitative, nonexperimental study examined the relationship between personality traits and cultural humility among licensed professional counselors in the United States. The participants included 125 licensed professional counselors who completed the HEXACO PI R 60-item inventory and Foronda’s Cultural Humility Scale. The results of a multiple linear regression were statistically significant for the overall model, F(6,118) = 6.165, p < .001, R² = .239, accounting for 23.9% of the variance in cultural humility. Openness to experience was a significantly negative predictor (B = –.519, p < .001), indicating that higher openness scores were associated with lower cultural humility; honesty-humility was not statistically significant (p = .052), and the remaining traits also were not significant predictors. These findings complicate assumptions about the dispositional roots of cultural humility and suggest potential implications for counselor education, including experiential learning, reflective supervision, and skills-based training that may support cultural humility development. The results suggest that personality traits may play a role in cultural humility and may have implications for integrating personality-related insights into multicultural frameworks, conceptualizing humility as a dynamic construct influenced by both traits and context.

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